O’Neill’s New Website: A Walk Through

O’Neill just launched a new website that they are extremely proud of. It was created by Achtung! “the award-winning digital agency based in Amsterdam.”

We decided to take a quick, web-addled, ADD tour through the site to see if they have improved anything. Follow the jump for a rundown of our user experience with the site and why we probably won’t be visiting this site again:
The site launches with a map of the coast of Santa Cruz California and a Flash count down meter that appears to chart the milage from Steamer Lane to the Hook. We never knew Santa Cruz took up 100 miles of coastline. It’s much bigger than we thought.

Next we were faced with a bunch of girls jumping off a cliff with their surfboards and a guy lost in the brush with his surfboard. Oh, apparently, the girls jumping off the cliff is the women’s side of the site and the guy lost in the weeds in the mens side. The little tags on the side should have tipped us off.

As much as we love girls in bikinis we’re going to roll our cursors over the men’s side. . . ah, another map. This time of the world. Apparently, we are supposed to click the part of the world we are from. Guess this new website has no idea where we’re from (must be technology only adult sites can afford).

We click North America and get another little flash loading circle spinning in the middle of the screen and then, whoa a screen filled with Hyperfreak stuff and guys with no shirts on looking tough. On the right side of the page there is something about an O’Neill Psych something. . . Oh, our browser isn’t wide enough. Let’s pull that out a little wider. It’s O’Neill Psycho something with a little white arrow over to the right. . . Whoa. Hover over that little arrow and the whole website begins to scroll sideways right to left. Crazy.

We click on Jordy Smith because we like that guy and get his bio, or half his bio because again, our browser doesn’t appear to be wide enough. Oh, little white arrow. Guess we’re supposed to scroll sideways again, but there’s no way to read the entire interview. It’s cut off halfway down. Guess we have to leave the little white sideways scroll arrow and use another Flash scroller control to scoll the interview up and down.

So, about those trunks we wanted to check out. Apparently, we have to click the word “Collection” at the top of the page to get to the trunks. We’ll try that. Collection clicked, then “boardshorts” and now we’re on another side scrolling page that shows us the trunks one at a time and very large. Apparently we have to scroll through every single one of them if we want to see the whole line. Guess showing smaller versions of all the trunks on one page is too boring.

Clicked on the Lopez Freak because they look cool. Nice. We’re going to buy a pair. Where is the “buy it” button? There is no “buy it” button, only a link to “Find A Shop.” On clicking “Find A Shop” we are faced with a decision: find a local shop by entering our zip code or clicking on one of the O’Neill Affiliates.

We try the zip code round and get a spinning circle for a while and then a list of shops that carry O’Neill in our area with a link to what they sell and another link to a map. Nice. If we had time to call all these shops to see if they had the Lopez Freak in stock in our size this is where we would start. But we like to shop online so we’re going to go the O’Neill Affiliate route. From the Shop Locator page we hit the back button on our browsers and are not taken back to the page we were on before, but right back to the main collection page. Now where did that dealer locator go? Found it? Bottom of the page next to the contact button. Gray text on black background makes it really easy to spot.

We click on Killer Dana and end up on an O’Neill page on their site with all the O’Neill trunks they have. Now what trunks were we looking for again? Damn, we forgot what those trunks were called. Guess we should have written it down on a pad of paper next to our keyboard. We’ll look back a few paragraphs because we’re pretty sure we wrote it down in this review. . . . oh yeah, the Lopez Freak. Killer Dana has it in eight color ways. Now which one is the new one? Must be the most expensive. Clicking on the $64.50 pair. Damn, don’t have our size. Back to the O’Neill site.

Since we like keeping track of the brands we like, we’re going to click the News section to see what’s going on and maybe get the O’Neill RSS feed so we can put it in our RSS feedreader. Clicking on the news section we get a big black page with some headlines down the left side. The Wilds of Tasmania story looks interesting. We click on it and nothing happens. We try clicking on another headline and still nothing happens. Maybe it’s because we’re using a Safari browser.

Closing Safari launching Firefox. Copy the URL from Safari and paste it into Firefox so we can start at the same page, hit return. The homepage loads again with the map of Santa Cruz and the 99 mile journey from Steamers to The Hook. Oh, wait, now the story has loaded. Guess Safari is the wrong browser for the news section.

The Tasmania story shows up and apparently we can scroll down to read the story or scroll right to roll through all the stories in the news section. Got it.

Now we’d like to load that RSS feed into our reader so we can keep track of what O’Neill is up to, but there is no RSS feed. At least we can’t find one. But since we’re here we’d like to blog a little about those trunks we found the Lopez Freak. So before we leave we’d like to go back and find them and get a link so we can send people back to the O’Neill website from our post. And, we think it worked, of course we get to see that 99 mile stretch of Santa Cruz again and a couple pages of spinning circles, but at least we end up on the right trunks page.

Just for fun we dove into the women’s side of the site (which you can’t get to unless you find the little link down at the bottom of the page between the Region Selector and the Newsletter, sign up) and we noticed that there is a way to view more product at once. Up in the upper right hand corner of the page there is a little thing that says “select your view size” which means you can set how much product you want to look at on a page. Wish we had seen that earlier.

Alright. We think our work is done here.

Now for the big question: will we ever come back to the new O’Neill site? Nope. Why not? There are three reasons:

1. Because there is no RSS feed that would keep us posted on new additions to the site.
2. We can’t buy any product from the site
3. Online retailers do a much better job of showing the O’Neill product in a way that makes it easy to make a purchase.

What other reason is there to visit the site? Which brings another question: what was the goal of the new website in the first place? If it was to have a cool online catalog with big pictures that people look at once and then throw away, then it’s perfect.